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      A Bargain at the Opera: Philadelphia Offers All Seats for as Low as $11

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      Seeking new audiences, Opera Philadelphia is putting in place a pay-what-you-can model, one of the first of its kind by a major opera company.In Philadelphia, a night at the opera may now be cheaper than going to the movies.Opera Philadelphia, a company with a reputation for innovation and ambition, announced on Tuesday that it was putting in place a pay-what-you-can model for the 2024-25 season, with all tickets for all performances starting at $11. The initiative, which the company calls Pick Your Price, is aimed at attracting new audiences.“People want to go to the opera, but it’s expensive,” said Anthony Roth Costanzo, the celebrated American countertenor who became the company’s general director and president in June. “Our goal is to bring opera to more people and bring more people to the opera.”It immediately proved popular. On Tuesday, the day the initiative was announced, Opera Philadelphia said it sold more than 2,200 tickets for the coming season, compared with about 20 the day before. The tickets were originally priced at $26 to $300.High ticket prices have long been a barrier to audiences, and especially to newcomers. In recent years a number of performing arts groups, including Lincoln Center, the Chicago Sinfonietta and Ars Nova, the Off Broadway incubator, have experimented with pay-what-you-can approaches. Other opera companies have experimented with discounts, including rush tickets and deals offered to young people. But Opera Philadelphia’s approach was one of the boldest yet.Its website explains that all tickets start at $11 but that people will be given the option of choosing to pay much more, including the standard price.Like many nonprofit performing arts organizations, Opera Philadelphia gets much more of its revenue from philanthropy than through ticket sales. Radically lowering the prices could encourage more donations, which will no longer risk being seen as subsidizing an expensive art form that is out of reach for many people. And Costanzo said that the new model would allow the company to concentrate more on staging interesting works, and less on worrying about ticket sales.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      10 Years After Eric Garner’s Death, an Opera Honors His Legacy

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      “The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist,” part of Lincoln Center’s summer festival, aims to shine light on police violence in the United States.In the middle of “The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist,” an opera about the police killing of Eric Garner, a singer portraying his daughter reflects on his famous final words: “I can’t breathe.”“I can’t let go,” she sings. “I hear his words again and again. A scream in a dream that escapes as a gasp.”A decade after Garner’s death, “Ritual of Breath,” which comes to Lincoln Center’s summer festival on Friday, aims to shine light on Garner’s legacy and the broader problem of police violence in the United States.The opera, composed by Jonathan Berger to a libretto by the poet Vievee Francis, focuses on Garner’s daughter, Erica, as she grapples with the pain, guilt and anger she feels over her father’s death. But “Ritual of Breath” also spotlights the stories of other Black people killed by the police, and issues a spirited call for empathy and change from performers including a 90-member choir spread across the stage and in the audience.“It’s not enough to say that someone died on the street — to reduce them to a chalk outline,” Francis said. “If we don’t know who that was, if we don’t see them as human, no difference will be made. Art allows us to feel that life.”The creators of “Ritual of Breath,” which premiered in 2022, hope that the opera will bring fresh attention to social injustice in American society. Niegel Smith, the show’s director, quoted a line from the opera’s final scene in explaining its message: “When a brother’s breath fails, we pick it up. When a sister’s breath fails, we pick it up.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Four Takeaways From the Metropolitan Opera’s Risky Season

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      The company has bet that new operas will attract new, more diverse audiences and revitalize a stale repertory. Is the gamble paying off?For years, the Metropolitan Opera — the nation’s largest performing arts institution, with a $300 million budget and 4,000-seat theater — was like an ocean liner, changing course slowly, if at all.But now it is trying to be more like a speedboat. Since the pandemic, with costs up and ticket sales down, the Met’s programming has taken a sharp swerve toward contemporary works, which used to come along once in a blue moon. In recent seasons, the Met has done fewer productions than it used to, but about a third of its operas now come from our times.Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, has staked a large part of his legacy on the bet that these new operas will attract new and more diverse audiences, revitalizing a house repertory better known for presenting “Tosca” and “La Traviata,” year after year. With the Met entering its summer break this week, is that bet paying off, artistically and financially?The experiment is, at best, a work in progress.The Met put on 18 operas during this so-so season, and if you line them up in order of paid attendance, only one of the six contemporary pieces, Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” is in the top half. Modern opera is not selling well, at least not better than classics like “The Magic Flute,” “Carmen” and “Turandot.”The Met’s economic model revolves around being able to efficiently bring back most pieces and have them find an audience. But this season raised alarms about how newer titles will do when revived. Gelb’s gamble on swiftly restaging two top sellers of recent seasons — Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours” — fizzled, with the theater over a third empty for both. (The average performance across the season was 72 percent full.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Royal Opera House’s Music Director Leaves His Mark

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      Antonio Pappano says the London house, where he is wrapping up 22 years as music director, “will always be my home.”After 22 years as the music director at the Royal Opera House in London, Antonio Pappano has a tried-and-true recipe for creating traction around the art form.“The choices you make and the energy which you share with audiences will keep them coming,” he said.The British-born conductor, 64, has left his mark on the house through a strong work ethic and an in-depth understanding of the voice. His final production is a David McVicar staging of Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier,” starring Jonas Kaufmann, that is onstage through Tuesday. He then leads the company on tour to Japan, from June 22 to July 2, with productions of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” and Puccini’s “Turandot.”Pappano, whose parents were Italian immigrants, gravitates naturally toward the works of that tradition. But he has also championed everyone including contemporary British composers, Russian repertoire and Wagner. Through 2027, he will return at intervals to the Royal Opera to conduct all four installments of a “Ring” cycle staged by Barrie Kosky.Parallel to the Royal Opera, Pappano served as the music director of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, a position that he relinquished last year. The next phase of his career will be dedicated to the London Symphony Orchestra, where he will officially take over as the chief conductor in the 2024-25 season.Pappano’s final production is a David McVicar staging of Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier,” starring Jonas Kaufmann, that is onstage through Tuesday. Isabel Infantes/ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Florentina Holzinger Brings Roller-Skating Nuns to the Opera House

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      The choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s shows feature circus performers and abundant nudity. Now, she’s bringing her experimental approach to opera.In a rehearsal last week at the Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin, northeastern Germany, Fleshpiece, a shirtless performer with tattoos and purple hair, strode to the front of the main stage and delivered an impassioned monologue.“This opera house, this is our church,” Fleshpiece intoned. “We continue to nail you to the present, just as Jesus was nailed to the cross.”Supervising the scene was the experimental choreographer Florentina Holzinger, wearing a black baseball cap and a T-shirt printed with a picture of two nuns engaged in B.D.S.M. play.Her previous works, including “Ophelia’s Got Talent” at the Volksbühne in Berlin and “A Divine Comedy” for the Rührtriennale festival, were boundary-pushing, peripatetic shows in which nudity, profanity, onstage helicopters, onstage ejaculation and performers hanging from their teeth have shocked and awed audiences. “Ophelia’s Got Talent” jointly won Germany’s Faust prize for best dance production last year, cementing Holzinger’s status as one of Europe’s rising theater stars.In the German-speaking world, that kind of profile brings invitations to direct opera — and Holzinger’s work, which matches music with powerful, stage-filling spectacle, certainly has operatic qualities. Yet a gilded opera theater still seems an unlikely home for Holzinger, 38, whose anarchic works are collaged from new and old text and music, often with sharply contrasting styles.Holzinger is known for her boundary-pushing experimental shows.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Robert Ashley’s ‘Foreign Experiences’ Returns

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      Robert Ashley’s 1994 opera “Foreign Experiences,” a portrait of a paranoid mind in free fall, is part of a wave of revivals following his death.The makings of opera are quite simple. Strip away the clichés of an opulent art form populated by Viking helmets and powdered wigs (and more than 400 years of history), and you end up with DNA shared by Claudio Monteverdi, Richard Wagner and Meredith Monk across centuries: an artificial, elevated form of speech that reaches for the sublime.Few composers have tested the fundamental qualities of opera as much as Robert Ashley, who died a decade ago at 83. He stretched language and banality to operatic extremes, exalting discarded bits of life as if they were cosmic, in stylized declamation that is every bit as musical as Mozart.Hardly mainstream, Ashley’s works were often performed as he wrote them, then talked about more than staged. Since his death, though, there has been a wave of fresh recordings and revivals, the latest of which is “Foreign Experiences” (1994), now running at Roulette in Brooklyn. A portrait of a mind in free fall, red-pilled before we were talking about red-pilling, it is essential viewing for those interested in the possibilities of opera.Picture an opera made entirely of a mad scene, and you have “Foreign Experiences,” an installment in “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” Ashley’s tetralogy whose construction recalls another four-work saga, Wagner’s “Ring.” In “Experiences,” the protagonist, Don Jr., spirals in isolation after a move to California, and from his apartment he imagines paranoid adventures in esoterica, in search of truths about power and wealth. He comes to conclusions like, “‘If you have to ask, you can’t afford one,’ I always thought we ought to have that carved into that stupid mountain with the four guys’ heads.”Don Jr.’s thoughts come quickly; “Foreign Experiences,” alone in “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” is set to 90 beats per minute instead of Ashley’s usual 72. And those beats matter to each line of the opera’s 50-page libretto. This is a work of extreme mathematical precision that, in performance, shows no signs of being precise at all, with manic speech unfurling over ambient synth chords that reflect both the mood and sound world of “The X-Files.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘The Hours’ Returns to the Met Opera With Its Stars

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      Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato reprised their roles in Kevin Puts’s adaptation of the award-winning novel and film.Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which had its stage premiere at the Metropolitan Opera last season and returned for its first revival on Sunday, is even prettier than I remember.In the often exquisite score, the strings throb and the woodwinds flutter. When Puts reaches for percussion instruments, he chooses the sweeter ones — glockenspiel, crotales, chimes, vibraphone — and combines them luxuriously. Woodwinds at the top of Act II are practically Wagnerian in their extravagant stateliness. Tender piano chords toll lonesomely. Musical surges are thick with nostalgia. The luscious vocal lines revel in love, and understanding, of the human voice.But it’s easy to miss the score’s manifold beauties when the stage is full of distractions. Extraneous dancers and supernumeraries flood Phelim McDermott’s production at the Met. In one moment, the choreographer Annie-B Parson has them twirl around holding pillows while a character considers killing herself in a hotel room. Adding to the busyness, Puts heavily features the chorus as a collective, omniscient narrator and the characters’ inner voices. As a device, it doesn’t work; while the story intimately intertwines the emotional lives of three women, the chorus infringes upon their connection with the audience.It’s almost as though Puts and McDermott are afraid to take a sustained look at their heroines, or that they don’t trust the audience’s attention span. This is especially perplexing considering they have three leads on the order of Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato, who reprised their roles on Sunday. When the stage was free of clutter, their star wattage was dazzling.As Virginia Woolf, DiDonato was a haunted, magisterial presence. Her voice, dark, fulsome and cutting, communicated Woolf’s intellectual depth and her personal demons; there was the insight and occlusion of a novelist at the height of her powers hiding her suicidal ideations from others. As Laura, O’Hara sang with a voice of fine crystal, and while her timbre was a little cloudier than it used to be, she embodied Laura’s fragile nerves and anxious self-loathing. The overall shape of Fleming’s voice remained improbably youthful in its creamy roundness. Her Clarissa was patrician yet superficial, though partial blame rests with the libretto, in which every other word of hers is “flowers” or “party.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Andrew Davis, 80, Dies; Renowned Conductor Who Championed Britain’s Music

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      Celebrated for his long tenure with Lyric Opera of Chicago, he led this and other orchestras with force and a notably energetic podium presence.Andrew Davis, an ebullient British conductor who brought energy to his countrymen’s compositions and passion to hundreds of opera performances, died on April 20 in Chicago. He was 80.His manager, Jonathan Brill, said the cause of Mr. Davis’s death, in a hospital, was leukemia.More than many conductors, Mr. Davis was remembered by those who worked with him as deriving a sense of physical enjoyment from the music — “almost a palpable pleasure,” the pianist Emanuel Ax said in an interview. And that translated into a pleasure for his collaborators. “People loved playing for him,” Mr. Ax said.Mr. Davis spent 21 years, from 2000 to 2021, as music director and principal conductor of one of America’s great opera companies, Lyric Opera of Chicago, in a vast repertoire ranging from Mozart through Wagner to Berg. He also led orchestras in Canada — the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, from 1975 to 1988 — and Australia — the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, from 2013 to 2019. He also conducted at the Glyndebourne Festival in England from 1988 to 2000.But it was as an interpreter of 20th-century British music, and particularly the works of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Holst, Britten and others, that Mr. Davis made his mark and earned his way into the affections of his fellow Britons. With its fervid, billowing patriotism and ruminative pastoral interludes, this music sometimes struggles to cross national boundaries.Mr. Davis conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1995. He was the orchestra’s principal conductor for a decade.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty ImagesMr. Davis, as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1989 to 2000 and at summer London Proms concerts in front of enthusiastic audiences of thousands in the Royal Albert Hall, made the most of the British compositions that were his specialty. This deep homegrown commitment led The New York Times’s Bernard Holland, reviewing a 1987 Avery Fisher Hall appearance by Mr. Davis that included little-known works by Arnold Bax and Michael Tippett, to write that “the music of 20th-century Britain has hugely profited from the fervent ministrations of British musicians and the British musical press.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More